Support for Unicode within the new Remote Print Manager Elite version 5.1 will allow Brooks Internet Software to support customers in Asia, the company announced last week. The printer utility, which works with IBM i servers, mainframes, and other hosts, also got a boost in the PCL processing department.

RPM Remote Print Manager is a Line Printer Daemon (LPD) print server designed to provide more flexibility in the management and handling of the print output of IBM i, mainframe, HP3000, OpenVMS, Unix, and Linux servers. The Windows-based software can perform various functions after intercepting print jobs from hosts, including converting EBCDIC to PCL and PCL to PDF, sending the file to a printer, distributing it via e-mail (either in the body or as an attachment), or storing it in an archive.

Brooks sells several versions of RPM Remote Print Manager. The Select edition, which starts at $324, supports an unlimited number of print queues on the front-end, but only 10 printers on the backend. The Elite edition, which starts at $648, supports up to 99 printers. It also features more output threads, making it ideal for larger environments, and sports a Web interface.

With last week's launch of RPM version 5.1, Brooks has bolstered the Elite edition with new PCL transformation capabilities. With this release, the Elite edition now automatically converts PCL print jobs into PDF print jobs.

The other major new feature is support for Unicode, which makes it easier for the product to support multi-byte character sets, such as those used by Asian languages. "With the extended Unicode support, we are supporting our enterprise customers in China, Japan, Korea, and other Asian countries who use wide character sets for text, printer and folder names, file paths, job names, and fonts," states company founder and CEO David Brooks in a press release. "This makes the software easier to use, and ensures Asian customers can correctly print localized characters and fonts."

Idaho Falls, Idaho-based Brooks develops several other products that are applicable to the IBM i environment, including ExcelliPrint IPDS, which converts print output from IBM's high-end AFPDS printing infrastructure into print jobs that run on less expensive printers, and INTELLIscribe LPR, which is used for document distribution. For more info, see www.brooksnet.com.